Written by Amanda Ensor
There’s a particular kind of electricity that runs through a room when strangers become, briefly and completely, one crowd. That’s exactly what greeted attendees before this year’s NSPRA (National School Public Relations Association) National Seminar even officially began.
As communicators from school districts across the country arrived at the conference hotel, they found themselves swept into something unplanned: a packed room of strangers gathered around screens for the World Cup Final. There were no name badges that mattered in that moment, no district lines, no job titles; just shared breath held during a shootout, spontaneous cheers from tables that had never spoken to each other, and the kind of collective joy that doesn’t care where you’re from.
It turned out to be the perfect overture for a conference themed Let the Good News Roll.
Because that’s the story school communicators tell every day, isn’t it? That community isn’t something you wait for, it’s something that happens the moment people decide to show up for the same thing, together. A World Cup final can do that for strangers in a hotel lobby. A viral moment on the district Instagram, a heartfelt shoutout at a board meeting, a hallway full of families cheering on a robotics team. That’s the same alchemy, scaled down to the size of a school community.
A Room Full of First-Timers, and a Field That Needs Them
This year’s seminar drew nearly 400 first-time attendees, a striking number for a profession navigating one of the toughest stretches public education has seen in a long time. That’s not a small detail. It means hundreds of communicators walked into their first NSPRA at a moment when the case for advocacy and visibility in public education has never been more urgent, and left as part of something larger: NSPRA now represents 1,500 voices for public education. Fifteen hundred people who show up, again and again, to remind the world what a conversation worth remembering sounds like.
Real Matters: Building Trust in an Unreal World
If the World Cup crowd captured the feeling the week was built around, keynote speaker Mariana Atencio gave that feeling a name: trust.
Her keynote, Real Matters: Building Trust in an Unreal World, landed like a thesis statement for the entire profession. Trust, she reminded the room, is the most valuable currency there is – hard to earn, easy to lose, and impossible to fake. It doesn’t scale the way follower counts do. It doesn’t respond to a press release template. And yet it’s the entire job.
One line in particular seemed to ripple through the room afterward: the best work in communications is meant to be invisible – until it matters most, and then you are the source of truth. There’s no certification program for “the trust business,” Atencio said, and yet trust remains the strongest anchor a communicator has.
Her framework for building it, what she called the architecture of trust, gave the room language for something many communicators feel but rarely name:
- Self-trust — Comes from the gut and from reps.
- Team trust — Seeing each other. Presence matters more than we admit.
- Org trust — Being seen. Defining your purpose. What’s your legacy? What transformation are you actually here to lead?
She tied it together with a phrase that felt like it was written for a room full of school communicators: real trust is built at eye level, meeting people where they are, making sure they know, unmistakably, “ I see you.”
It’s hard not to hear an echo of that first night in the room. A hotel lobby full of strangers, eyes on the same screen, no eye level required to feel like one crowd. Trust, connection, community. Maybe the World Cup crowd wasn’t a warm-up act for the theme. Maybe it was the theme, playing out before anyone had said a word about it.
Where TalkingPoints Fits In
That idea of trust built at eye level is one we spend every day thinking about at TalkingPoints — just applied to a different relationship. Families are as much a part of the trust equation as any staff meeting or board update. Better student outcomes start with stronger family partnerships, and that partnership only holds if families feel seen, heard, and met where they are — in the language they speak, on the channel they already use.
See how TalkingPoints helps districts build family trust through two-way, multilingual communication.
We were glad to bring that conversation to NSPRA this year, both at our booth and in a session alongside Aurora Public Schools, where we dug into what it actually looks like to operationalize family partnership at scale — not as a slogan, but as daily practice. If Atencio’s architecture of trust starts with self, team, and org, we’d add a fourth layer school communicators know well: family trust. It’s built the same way — through presence, through showing up consistently, through communication that says, unmistakably, we see you.
That’s the work. And after our time at NSPRA, it’s clear we’re not the only ones showing up for it.
